WHAT playwright John Godber asked young actress Gilly Tompkins to do was simple enough. He needed her to go on stage and tell the Edinburgh Festival audience that the play they were going to see didn't have an interval.

Tompkins, a student at Bretton Hall near Leeds at the time, was appearing in the Scottish city in a National Student Drama Festival production. Godber was also in town performing his play September In The Rain - the one with no interval - and volunteered her to make the announcement.

"I walked out and there were about 700 people. I tripped up, made a comment and ten minutes later was still there," she recalls. "I was standing there thinking, 'this man is going to kill me'. But he came up to me afterwards and said, 'you went down better than the play'."

It was the start of a beautiful friendship, one that has seen the prolific Godber write plays with Tompkins in mind.

After their Edinburgh meeting, they went their separate ways. Then one day, while Tompkins was working as a PA on Ian Botham's John O'Groats to Lands End walk, her phone rang and it was Godber asking, "Do you want to come and audition?".

She has no idea how he tracked her down but she's been a regular in Godber plays and with his Hull Truck theatre company ever since.

"He kept writing and I've kept working for him," she says.

Tompkins sees him as a writer who can make people laugh and then turn it on its head and make them cry. If, like her, you're someone who's in tune with that "instant emotion", as she calls it, then that's the reason he continues to employ you. Godber must have written around nine plays with her in mind. "If he knows you, he can hear the voice when he's writing a character," she says. "I can see elements of me in them. I can hear the way I speak. I find it very easy to do the characters he's written for me, although I don't feel I own any of them."

The play that brings her to York isn't by John Godber. But Jim Cartwright's award-winning comedy Two does reunite her with two other Hull Truck regulars, director Nick Lane and actor Eamonn Flemming.

The two actors play 14 characters between them, including the landlord and landlady of a Northern pub. "There's no time for full costume, sometimes just a handbag or coat or scarf for a new character," says Tompkins. "It's more of an actors' piece, relying on the actor to convey the different characters and different accents."

Tompkins was born in London, raised in Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire, and studied in Yorkshire, but Northern accents aren't a problem. "In fact, I did so many plays with John Godber with Northern accents I found it hard to get an agent in London because they all thought I was Northern," she says.

"I saw the original production of Two in Edinburgh with John McArdle and Sue Johnston, and they were absolutely fantastic. I remember thinking, 'what a brilliant piece'. It's very funny but there's a depth of emotion. Each person who comes on has a story to tell."

She and Flemming went to a pub in York for a publicity photo shoot, where she found that she wasn't ideally qualified to work behind a bar. "I was a bit short, I only came up so high behind the bar," she says.

She directed Flemming at Hull Truck in a stage version of Frankenstein, adapted from the novel by Lane. She's known him since he was a child, when he played in a production of Oliver Twist in Hull. "He's an all-round talent. He can act, direct and write. It's lovely to be directed by him, it's a happy rehearsal room. When you know people well, there's a shorthand," she says.

She's becoming an all-rounder thanks to Godber, whom she's known for 22 years. "He's encouraged me to embrace other things as an actor and to write," she says. "I've just got a grant for a children's show which I'll do as a workshop and showcase performance, then re-apply for a grant to tour it."

She's also started directing. After assisting Godber on shows, she directed a revival of Teachers. He originally asked her to direct a Shakespeare, Antony & Cleopatra or Romeo & Juliet, but she said 'no' as she didn't feel confident of tackling such large projects. "But having done Teachers for two years of my life, I was safe to do that."

* Two runs in The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until June 17. Tickets (01904) 623568 or online at www.yorktheatreroyal.co.u